Can we get a fanfare of trumpets, please? The time has come to introduce you to our TC Top Picks for Disrupt Berlin 2019. The ingenuity and creativity reflected in the international startup community can’t be overstated, and narrowing the field from the hundreds of applications we received was no easy task.

The program showcases outstanding early-stage startups across these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, and CRM/Enterprise.

Challenging as it was, TechCrunch editors had a (wicked fun) job to do — select up to five early-stage startups they felt represent the best of their specific tech category. This remarkable cadre of early-stage startups knocked our proverbial socks off. Cold toes notwithstanding, we think you’ll be equally impressed.

Founders who earn the TC Top Picks designation receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, one full day of exhibiting, three free Founder passes, intense investor and media interest and VIP treatment — including an interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor. And we promote that video across our social media platforms.

Alright, it’s time for the big reveal. Congratulations to the TC Top Picks for Disrupt Berlin 2019!

Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning

Apostera: An automotive company offering a set of innovative products world-wide.CYANITE: Music analysis tool — the interface between the music industry, data science and software engineering.Prodsight: Helps companies make data-driven product development decisions.Stormly: An AI-powered platform that works as a data consultant.Timekettle Technologies: Committed to building a global brand of AI translator so immersive that it disappears into the experience.

Biotech + Healthtech

Glazomer: An affordable Hi-End Eye Tracking system for professional academic and clinical research.Healthy Quit: Digital health company and a pharmacy that provides vaping and smoking cessation by utilizing an artificial intelligent treatment algorithm and medications to help patients quit.mettleAI: Leveraging ML/AI to predict substance abuse relapse before it happens.Thryve: We power the individualization of health care by providing the API needed by health services to access health data from more than 100 wearables.Volta Medical: Aims at developing a wide range of intelligent software solutions designed to guide cardiologists during interventional procedures.

Blockchain

Acatena AG: IoT & Blockchain platform to reinvent premium product authenticity.Anytype: An operating system for the new internet.etoshi: The all-in-one crypto platform: trading, wallets and taxes under one roof!SIMBA Chain: A cloud-based, smart-contract-as-a-service (SCaaS) platform, enabling users across a variety of skill sets to implement dapps (decentralized applications).

CRM + Enterprise

Cumul.io: A cloud analytics platform for business experts & SaaS companies to integrate intuitive yet powerful data visualization into their daily lives.cux.io: Your one-stop shop for understanding your users’ experiences online.Radicalbit: Event stream processing self-service platform. One platform for data engineering, data ops & MLOps on top of Kafka.Stack: Internet launchpad, increasing the efficiency of working with the web for the average internet users by allowing simultaneous use of multiple web-apps within a neatly organized working environment.Usercentrics: A CMP that helps enterprise customers obtain, manage and document the user consent, with all different aspects of consent storage, consent API’s, consent in ad tech.

Fintech

ChromaWay: Blockchain “2.0” platform that enables smart contracts and digital assets for financial applications and non-financial applications.CurioInvest: A technology platform that lets anyone invest directly in rare alternative assets.Raison: A platform for operations with investments and personal finance.TXC Markets: Peer to peer fintech trading technologies and marketplaces for illiquid and alternative assets.

Mobility + Transportation

DUCKT: The world’s first universal electrical scooter charging station. Better operations, better experience for people & the city.MachineMax: Used to track utilisation, idling, fuel and geolocation for any machine.Pixmoving: Provides universal autonomous driving chassis.Qibus: Making autonomous mobility a reality.TRAXIT: Tracking multi service company changing the way we track our belongings, starting from Aviation vertical.

Privacy + Security

Nect: Delivers the self-service future of identity verification as a service — easy to use and with military-grade security.o.vision: Develops facial identification solutions for integration within smart office frameworks and commercial bank security systems.Sypher Solutions: Software platform that simplifies analysis and helps prevent mistakes when documenting and maintaining GDPR compliance.Wire: The most secure collaboration platform, transforming the way business’ communicate in the same way and speed that our founders disrupted telephony with Skype.

Retail + E-commerce

combyne: A social tool for combining clothing. Our vision is to digitize the usage of fashion.Fashwire: A global data-driven marketplace with 200+ fashion designers from 25+ countries.Squareshot: We help consumer, fashion and dnvb brands streamline content production and create beautiful product shots to maximize their online sales.

Robotics + Hardware + IoT

Aether Biomedical: A rehabilitation robotics startup focused on building bionic limbs for upper limb amputees.Domotron: The most advanced smart home that adapts to your lifestyle. To make your life easier.Infocode: Smart building solution company that provides smart waste bin for office and public spaces.RoboChef: World’s first fully automated robotic kitchen cooking 500+ recipes with ZERO manual effort powered by IoT, Robotics & AI.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Buy your pass today and be sure to swing by Startup Alley to meet and greet the TC Top Picks. One more thing. It’s not too late to buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and strut your stuff alongside hundreds of companies and sponsors. All exhibiting startups have a shot at winning the Wild Card to compete for $50,000 in our famous pitch competition, Startup Battlefield. What have you got to lose? Nuthin!

Nigerian digital payments firm Interswitch confirmed today it has reached unicorn status after Visa acquired a minority equity stake in the firm.

“The investment makes Interswitch one of the most valuable African fintech businesses with a valuation of $1 billion,” Interswitch said in a release to TechCrunch.

The Visa investment could create the first of two market distinctions for Interswitch — as it shouldn’t change the Lagos-based company’s plans to go public.

“An IPO is still very much in the cards; likely sometime in the first half of 2020,” a source with knowledge of the situation told TechCrunch on background.

Interswitch did not reveal the amount of Visa’s investment and would not confirm Sky News reporting Monday that pegged it at $200 million for 20%.

Whatever the exact number, Interswitch’s confirmation of a $1 billion valuation marks another milestone in African tech.

Only one VC-backed startup, turned later-stage company on the continent — e-commerce venture Jumia — has generated enough revenue and capital to achieve a ten-figure valuation.

For the near to medium-term, Interswitch could stand as Africa’s sole tech-unicorn, as Jumia’s volatile share-price and declining market-cap since an April IPO have dropped the company’s worth below $1 billion (for now).

Founded in 2002 by Mitchell Elegbe, Interswitch pioneered the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s then predominantly paper-ledger and cash-based economy.

The company now provides much of the rails for Nigeria’s online banking system that serves Africa’s largest economy and population. Interswitch offers a number of personal and business finance products, including its Verve payment cards and Quickteller payment app.

From its home-base of Nigeria, Interswitch has expanded its physical presence to Uganda, Gambia and Kenya .

Interswitch also sells its products in 23 African countries and launched a partnership in August for its Verve cardholders to make payments on Discover’s global network.

Visa and Interswitch are touting the equity investment as a strategic collaboration between the two companies, without a lot of detail on what that will mean.

“The partnership will create an instant acceptance network across Africa to benefit consumers and merchants,” was the characterization offered in a press release.

Interswitch’s imminent IPO has been delayed for several years. CEO and founder Mitchell Elegbe told TechCrunch, “a dual-listing on the London and Lagos stock exchange is an option on the table,” in a January 2016 call.

In subsequent years, Elegbe and other Interswitch executives named Nigeria’s recession as a reason for the delay.

A number of stories have surfaced, including Bloomberg News reporting in July that the company was poised to go public on the LSE.

TechCrunch’s source close to the matter offered the latest indication that Interswitch will list on a major exchange by mid-2020.

With possible exits for backers Helios Investment Partners, TA Investments and IFC, Interswitch’s unicorn status and pending IPO could create more momentum for startup investment in Africa. VC to the continent has grown significantly over the last five years, but stands at just over $1 billion annually, per Partech numbers.

Interswitch also could be in a stronger position to offer more capital directly to the continent’s fintech startups by reviving its ePayment Growth Fund. The venture arm made two investments in 2015, but then went largely quiet.

 

 

 

 

While across much of Asia, November 11th is either “singles day” (a $38 billion Alibaba extravaganza this year) or Pepero Day (named because 11/11 looks like a bunch of chocolate dessert sticks), here in the United States and parts of Europe, November 11th also marks the end of World War I and the commemoration of Veterans Day.

Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of soldiers leave active duty and transition into the civilian workforce, a route that can be startlingly difficult to navigate. How do you describe what an ordnance specialist does to civilians who have no idea what an MOS is? While the military teaches skills useful to a wide number of professions, holding the right conversations in a job search is key to making the leap.

That’s why a spate of new programs aims to help make it easier for veterans to head into the civilian workforce, and particularly into tech, which obviously has huge growth and great jobs waiting for those who can lock them up. I’ve previously covered one TechStars-connected non-profit, Patriot Boot Camp, which helps veterans looking to launch startups navigate the founder route.

One company that we haven’t covered on TechCrunch before though is Shift.org, an a16z-backed for-profit startup that aims to help veterans learn the key career skills needed to “shift” from the military into the civilian workforce.

Today for Veterans Day, the company announced a new employer partnership with mortgage fintech startup Better.com that will see Better.com hire 80 veterans in the next few months using Shift.org as a sourcing pool, with a projected hiring target of 5,000 veterans and their spouses by 2025 (assuming, as with all high-growth startups, that the high-growth continues firing on all cylinders).

In a press statement, Better.com CEO Vishal Garg said that “Veterans are an untapped source of talent that learned, operated and adapted to some of the world’s most innovative technologies from VR to robotics, nuclear technology and cyber.”

I chatted a bit with Shift.org CEO Mike Slagh about how he sees these partnerships and his own path into building a company. “I got started three years ago after serving in the Navy for just over five years as a bomb disposal officer,” he explained. In many ways, Shift.org was trying to fix his own challenge in moving back into the civilian workforce:

… My story was, I was going on base to the career fairs — there are these big aircraft hangers — and you’re sitting across the table from these employers, and they’re telling you what it’s like to work at their company, they’re telling you what [their] culture is like, and it’s just really hard to picture and it’s such an anxiety-ridden decision, and a big high-stakes moment in your life where you want to get it right for your family, you want to get it right for your future career trajectory.

Part of that anxiety is that saying the right things is often more crucial in recruitment settings than having the right skills. Slagh said that “I actually think that the gap is much narrower than many people naturally assume,” but, “you have to oftentimes have industry-specific context for somebody to take a bet on you when you have a non-traditional background.”

Since launching, Shift.org has partnered with employers like Better.com, Major League Baseball, and Symantec to help bridge the divide and open the pipeline to a wider and more diverse set of candidates.

The company was first funded by Garrett Camp of Expa Labs, and netted a reported $4 million round from Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz early last year. Slagh said his hope is to eventually work with hundreds of thousands of veterans not just secure great jobs, but also to train them in the skillsets they need to succeed in the future. The company is exclusively partnered today with Lambda School to help provide some of that technical background, for instance.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here: 464th 1Mby1M Roundtable November 7, 2019: With Francisco Jardim, SP Ventures

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eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) recently reported its third quarter results. Its GMV declined in the US and it missed revenue estimates. While the new internet sales tax laws are partly to blame, increasing...

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Frontier Car Group, the Berlin-based startup building used car marketplaces targeting high-growth, emerging markets, has picked up another significant round of funding from a strategic backer also focusing on the same geographical opportunity.

Today, OLX, the online classifieds division Prosus (the digital division of Naspers that listed earlier this year in Europe) announced that it would invest up to $400 million in Frontier, in a mix of equity, secondary share acquisitions and existing business shares. The deal will include a primary capital injection of an unspecified amount, which OLX has confirmed to me values Frontier Car Group at $700 million, post-money.

In terms of business shares: OLX also said that it will be contributing its shares in a JV it had in place with Frontier in India and Poland. Meanwhile, the secondary acquisitions — the shares are currently held by other investors, founders and management — are subject to a tender process. The markets that Frontier operates in now include Nigeria, Mexico, Chile, Pakistan, Indonesia and the USA (where it acquired WeBuyAnyCar last year), in addition to India and Poland.

Notably, even before the full $400 million amount is exercised (that is, after the tender process is completed), an OLX spokesperson confirmed that first capital injection will make it Frontier’s largest single shareholder (but not the majority shareholder), which essentially values the deal at less than $350 million (based on the $700 million valuation).

Today, Frontier Car Group offers buyers and sellers a range of services: in addition to basic inventory listings, there are inspection reports, financial, pricing guides, warranties and insurance. The plan will be to expand more services for one of the key players in the used-car space, dealers — via Frontier’s Dealer Management System — more resale services (via OLX) and more CarFax/Blue Book-style pricing guides and other products.

Frontier sold about $700 million worth of cars in the past year, triple its value of a year before.

As a point of reference, in May of last year, when the company raised $58 million, it had sold 50,000 cars to date and was on track for $200 million in annualised revenues. CEO and co-founder Sujay Tyle says the company has been on a growth tear.

“FCG has nearly tripled performance across every key metric since the first OLX Group investment less than 18 months ago and has expanded to four new countries in that time,” said Tyle in a statement. “This is a testament to FCG’s team, the ripe market opportunity, and the results of early integration with OLX in our key markets. Together with OLX and Prosus, we are aiming to revolutionize the used car market in several emerging and developed economies by adding trust, transparency and a comprehensive suite of services to all participants in the ecosystem.”

“Together with FCG, we are aiming to build the leading global used car marketplace, offering a premium and convenient service to millions of car buyers, sellers and dealers,” said Martin Scheepbouwer, CEO of OLX Group. “We’re in a unique position to accelerate the expansion of this platform worldwide. Our experience in India is a great proof of concept, where within the space of a year, our joint venture has already increased the number of stores threefold, with car purchase volumes continuing to grow by 10% month-on-month.”

This is the second time that OLX has invested in Frontier: In May 2018, Naspers invested $89 million in the business, an investment that came just weeks after Frontier had raised $58 million from Balderton, TPG and others.

The deal underscores the longtime trend of consolidation in e-commerce businesses — something Prosus is also seeing played out in a completely different arena, that of food delivery.

The basics of the economy-of-scale principle, as applied to used car sales, goes something like this: economies of scale makes a platform more useful (there will be more cars on it, and less on competitors’ sites); but it also potentially means that Frontier would be making more transactions, thereby more revenues overall; and building and running more sales on the same platform improves the margins on the investment that gets made in building and operating that platform.

Targeting P2P used car sales in emerging markets is a big potential business: In part because of the nature of those economies, car owners are more likely to sweat out assets rather than go for buying completely new vehicles. OLX notes that combining the operations in Frontier’s footprint with those of the JV businesses that it is now taking over, plus OLX’s own business in Latin America, Asia and Poland, results in a market where some 30 million used cars are sold annually, “more than double that of China.”

Sardor has bootstrapped a marketplace of home appliance technicians to over $10 million in revenue. Great story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?...

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Over the past few years, Andela has built a simple yet powerful answer to the talent shortage in Silicon Valley and other overheating tech ecosystems. The company helps you hire some of the most talented software developers in a handful of African cities. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Andela co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Andela’s basic premise is that expertise is evenly distributed across the globe. And yet, the biggest tech companies are concentrated in a few places. More and more companies are now open to hiring remote employees, and Andela is taking advantage of that.

The company makes it easy to find software engineers in no time. It screens applications and selects the best software engineers that can develop in JavaScript (React.js, Angular.js), Python, Ruby, PHP and for the Android platform.

So far, 130,000 people have applied and Andela only accepted the top 1,000 engineers. The startup then tries to match your company with the best candidates for the job in order to facilitate onboarding. After that, you have a new team member.

With offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, New York, San Francisco and Austin, Andela is trying to create a bridge between some of the most active tech communities in Africa and U.S.-based startups.

This isn’t Jeremy Johnson’s first startup. The young entrepreneur previously co-founded 2U, a software solution that helps schools and universities provide online degree programs. The company went public in 2014.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Jeremy Johnson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Andela, a company that builds high-performing, distributed engineering teams with Africa’s most talented software developers. Founded on the premise that brilliance is evenly distributed, Andela is solving the global technical talent shortage while catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems on the African continent.

Prior to founding Andela, Jeremy co-founded 2U, one of the fastest growing education technology startups to date. 2U went public in 2014 (NASDAQ:TWOU) and continues to transform higher education by delivering the world’s best online degree programs with top tier universities.

Jeremy is recognized broadly for his work as an education innovator. He has spoken on education and entrepreneurship at meetings hosted by the White House and Congress. His speaking appearances include conferences and college campuses around the world as well as media outlets like NBC, ABC, FOX, and CNBC. Jeremy was named “30 Under 30” by Inc. Magazine in 2012 and Forbes in 2013 and 2014.

Outside of Andela, Jeremy serves on the board of the Young Entrepreneur Council and the education non-profit PENCIL and co-authored a book for the World Economic Forum: ‘Education & Skills 2.0: New Targets & Innovative Approaches.’

This report from Gartner says that end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 25% in 2020. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech Posts Apple’s Subscription...

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Voi Technology, the “micro-mobility” startup that operates an e-scooter service in a 38 cities across 10 European countries, has raised an $85 million in Series B funding.

Backing the round is a mixture of existing and new investors. They include Balderton Capital, Creandum, Project A, JME Ventures, Raine Ventures, Kreos Capital, Inbox Capital, Rider Global, and Black Ice Capital. The new funding brings the total raised by Voi to $136 million.

Eagled-eyed readers will have noticed that, based on our previous Voi coverage, the total figure is $32 million short. That’s because not all of Voi’s previous Series A commitment was cashed in after the company was offered more favourable terms for its $30 million Series A extension and therefore elected not to draw down the second tranche of its original Series A.

Launched in 2018, the company is best-known for its e-scooter rentals but now pitches itself as a micro-mobility provider, offering a number of different transport devices. These include various e-scooter and e-bike models, in a bid to become a broader transport operator helping to re-shape urban transport and wean people off using cars.

To date, Voi says it has 4 million registered users and has powered 14 million rides. More recently it has launched new, more robust hardware that has been designed to sustain the rigours of commercial e-bike sharing. The idea is that more suitable hardware will help e-scooter companies improve margins since more rides can be extracted from the life-span of each vehicle.

On that note, Voi says it will use the new funding to develop “strong profitable businesses” in the 38 cities where it is already operating, as well as increase its R&D spend to improve its technology platform and products. Earlier this year, the company announced that it is already profitable in the cities of Stockholm and Oslo.

“Clearly, we feel we are on track to achieve this in more of our cities and that is our aim,” Voi co-founder and CEO Fredrik Hjelm tells me. “At this point, a key focus for us is to ensure we continue to increase the lifetime of our e-scooters, forge key partnerships and continue to work in those cities which provide the best conditions for a profitable e-scooter business”.

Hjelm says that Voi’s version 2 scooters are projected to last over 18 months, which means the company should be in profit before it needs to raise again. However, he wouldn’t be drawn on when that might be.

With regards to R&D and improvements to the Voi platform, the company will continue to work on the lifetime of its e-scooters, in addition to improved repair management via integrating “predictive diagnostics”.

Hjelm also says Voi is developing “AI-powered” fleet management and more generally the platform’s capability to support future product portfolio expansion. In other words, we can expect new micro-mobility device categories in the future.

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Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Uber’s new “money” team. Before that, I told you about how SoftBank is screwing up.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

Airbnb’s growing up

Following the death of five people at a Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental, and a scathing Vice report outlining Airbnb’s failure to prevent nation-wide scams, the company says it will begin verifying all seven million of its listings.

Airbnb properties will soon be verified for accuracy of photos, addresses, listing details, cleanliness, safety and basic home amenities, according to a company-wide email sent by Airbnb co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky on Wednesday. All rentals that meet the company’s new standards will be “clearly labeled” by December 15, 2020, he notes. Beginning next month, Airbnb will rebook or refund guests who check into rentals that do not meet the new accuracy standards.

These changes, outlined fully here, come as Airbnb preps for an IPO or a direct listing slated for 2020. The company was in need of some serious additions to its barely-there security measures and it also needed to make a grand gesture (or two) to Wall Street following multiple PR disasters over the last two weeks. Airbnb’s response to the recently-highlighted problems will help determine how it fares on the public market and given its quick and seemingly comprehensive response, money managers may be pleased.

Meet me in Berlin

The TechCrunch team is heading to Berlin again this year for our annual event, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, which brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. We announced the agenda this week, with leading founders including Away’s Jen Rubio and UiPath’s Daniel Dines. Take a look at the full agenda.

I will be there to interview a bunch of venture capitalists, who will give tips on how to raise your first euros. Buy tickets to the event here.

VC deals

Coveo raises $172M at $1B valuation for AI-based enterprise search and moreCyber-skills platform Immersive Labs nabs $40MMedopad raises $25M to develop biomarkers tracked via apps and wearablesNeural Magic secures $15M seed to run machine learning models on commodity CPUsChronosphere launches with $11M Series AStealth fintech Digits nabs $10.5M from BenchmarkParabol, the meta-meeting software toolkit, raises $4MWardrobe picks up $1.5M for a new fashion rental serviceYC-grad Elpha picks up seed funding

Joshua Luber runs a sneaker empire valued at more than $1 billion, but he thinks they’re just now scratching the surface. The consumer marketplace recently expanded to include a fifth category (collectibles). “It’s an evolution of eBay that works similar to the stock market,” Luber states, “but at the core, it’s around the concept of true market price.” 

We visited StockX’s 15,000-square-foot facility in Detroit to get a peek into their authentication process, and sat down with Luber to chat about humble beginnings, business expansion and sneakers.

We won’t bury the lead on this news, startup fans. We’re giving all you professional procrastinators and time-delayed decision makers an extra week to pull yourselves together and score early-bird savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December).

Early-bird pricing remains in play until 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t let this last-chance clock run out. Beat the deadline, buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin and keep up to €500 in your wallet.

One of the many awesome aspects of Disrupt is the opportunity to learn from a range of experts in the startup community. Here are just three examples of the knowledge you can absorb at Disrupt. Want more? Check out the full event agenda.

Series A financing is a tricky beast and one of the hardest deals to close. If this hot topic speaks to you, don’t miss this panel discussion going down on the Extra Crunch Stage.

What does it take to raise a Series A with Jessica Holzbach (founder, Penta) and Louise Samet (partner, Blossom Capital). Venture capital funds have boomed this decade, but raising money is still hard for young companies. What are investors today looking for in teams, metrics and products?

Climate change is arguably the biggest issue of our time. Learn how one founder turned sustainability into her business.

How to build sustainability as a business with Benjamina Bollag (founder/CEO, Higher Steaks). As climate change and the impacts of a warming world become more important for the consumers who are exposed to it, hear from a developer of lab-grown meat and others on how to build sustainability as a business.

Who wouldn’t love a crystal ball to divine investment trends for the coming year? We have the next best thing — minus the hocus pocus.

Investing in 2020 with Carolina Brochado (investment director, SoftBank Vision Fund) and Tom Hulme (general partner, GV). Nothing changes quite as rapidly as investment trends. Brochado and Hulme will offer perspectives from their experience both on the ground in Europe and from 50,000 feet to talk about what 2020 has in store for startups.

There’s plenty more knowledge and opportunity packed into two short days. Don’t miss the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. Be there as 15-20 stellar startups vie for the Disrupt Cup, investor love, media attention and the $50,000 prize.

Looking for skilled coders to help bring your vision to life? Head to the Extra Crunch Stage and watch the Hackathon finalists pitch working products they designed and built in 24 pressure-filled hours. Who will win the $5,000 prize for best overall hack?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. This is it — one extra week. You have until 15 November at 11:59 (CEST) — an extra week to buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin. Get ‘er done!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Stock trading app Robinhood is valued at $7.6 billion, but it only operates in the U.S. Freshly funded fintech startup Alpaca does the dirty work so developers worldwide can launch their own competitors to that investing unicorn. Like the Stripe of stocks, Alpaca’s API handles the banking, security and regulatory complexity, allowing other startups to quickly build brokerage apps on top for free. It has already crossed $1 billion in transactions within a year of launch.

The potential to power the backend of a new generation of fintech apps has attracted a $6 million Series A round for Alpaca led by Spark Capital . Instead of charging developers, Alpaca earns its money through payment for order flow, interest on cash deposits and margin lending, much like Robinhood.

“I want to make sure that people even outside the U.S. have access” to a way of building wealth that’s historically only “available to rich people” Alpaca co-founder and CEO Yoshi Yokokawa tells me.

Hailing from Japan, Yokokawa followed his friends into the investment banking industry, where he worked at Lehman Brothers until its collapse. After his grandmother got sick, he moved into day-trading for three years and realized “all the broker dealer business tools were pretty bad.” But when he heard of Robinhood in 2013 and saw it actually catering to users’ needs, he thought, “I need to be involved in this new transformation” of fintech.

Yokokawa ended up first building a business selling deep learning AI to banks and trading firms in the foreign exchange market. Watching clients struggle to quickly integrate new technology revealed the lack of available developer tools. By 2017, he was pivoting the business and applying for FINRA approval. Alpaca launched in late 2018, letting developers paste in code to let their users buy and sell securities.

Now international developers and small hedge funds are building atop the Alpaca API so they don’t have to reinvent the underlying infrastructure themselves right away. Alpaca works with clearing broker NTC, and then marks up margin trading while earning interest and payment for order flow. It also offers products like AlpacaForecast, with short-term predictions of stock prices, AlpacaRadar for detecting price swings and its MarketStore financial database server.

The $6 million from Spark Capital, Social Leverage, Portag3, Fathom Capital and Zillionize adds to $5.8 million in previous funding from investors, including Y Combinator. The startup plans to spend the cash on hiring to handle partnerships with bigger businesses, supporting its developer community and ensuring compliance.

One major question is whether fintech businesses that start to grow atop Alpaca and drive its revenues will try to declare independence and later invest in their own technology stack. There’s the additional risk of a security breach that might scare away clients.

Alpaca’s top competitor, Interactive Brokers, offers trading APIs, but other services as well that distract it from fostering a robust developer community, Yokokawa tells me. Alpaca focuses on providing great documentation, open-source contribution and SDKs in different languages that make it more developer-friendly. It will also have to watch out for other fintech services startups like DriveWealth and well-funded Galileo.

There’s a big opportunity to capitalize on the race to integrate stock trading into other finance apps to drive stickiness because it’s a consistent, voluntary behavior rather than a chore or something only done a few times a year. Lender SoFi and point-of-sale system Square both recently became broker dealers as well, and Yokokawa predicts more and more apps will push into the space.

Why would we need so many stock trading apps? “Every single person is involved with money, so the market is huge. Instead of one-player takes all, there will be different players that can all do well,” Yokokawa tells me. “Like banks and investment banks co-exist, it will never be that Bank of America takes 80% of the pie. I think differentiation will be on customer acquisition, and operations management efficiency.”

The co-founder’s biggest concern is keeping up with all the new opportunities in financial services, from cash management and cryptocurrency that Robinhood already deals in, to security token offerings and fractional investing. Yokokawa says, “I need to make sure I’m on top of everything and that we’re executing with the right timing so we don’t lose.”

The CEO hopes that Alpaca will one day power broader access to the U.S. stock market back in Japan, noting that if a modern nation still lags behind in fintech, the rest of the world surely fares even worse. “I want to connect this asset class to as many people as possible on the earth.”